Can you upgrade the RAM in a late 2013 IMac?

Your hard drive is running about as fast as its low-end specs (SATA 3GB 5400rpm) allow. It is healthy, just too slow for modern macOS versions.

Note how many entries there are for Intego. All that workload and no benefit.

Chrome is rather hard on entry-level computers. And its minion "helpers" love to hog resources, as demonstrated here:

Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:

Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)

Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (9) 2.05 GB (Google LLC) 😱

EtreCheckPro 590 MB (Etresoft, Inc.)

Google Chrome 248 MB (Google LLC)

kernel_task 245 MB (Apple)

MTLCompilerService (6) 161 MB (Apple)

That is 25 percent of your installed RAM. 😳

You can start by removing Chrome from your User Log-in Items.

User Login Items:

[Not Loaded] Garmin Express Service (Garmin International - installed 2022-08-02)

Modern Login Item

/Applications/Garmin Express.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/Garmin Express Service.app

[Running] Google Chrome (Google LLC - installed 2022-11-29)

Application

/Applications/Google Chrome.app

No sense overloading the system when it is so easy to launch an app from the Dock.

You may see a performance improvement by evicting the WD software. It has never been very good and has slowed both PowerPC and Intel-powered Macs for me. It is not needed for Time Machine to work properly.

The cost-effective solution to your speed problem is an external USB3 drive enclosure with an SATA 6GB solid-state drive inside, then set as the boot volume. That will increase your data transfer from the current 70 MB/sec to around 400MB/sec with a remarkable improvement in how fast your computer responds.

Hi, DAP221, see this Apple link to see if that’s possible… Install memory in an iMac - Apple Support… there should be a sub-link which explains how to do that and what type/kind of RAM modules/sticks you need… Max RAM should be either 16 GB( for the 21”’version) or 32 GB( for the 27” version) you should only buy RAM from a reputable vendor who offers a “no-fuss”’return policy and a long warranty… depending on where you live I’d go with OWC( macsales.com) , but that’s just a suggestion… 8 GB is the bare minimum to run Catalina , so, no wonder it’s running slowly and you’re running out of RAM…. 32 GB would cost you $90 + tax and shipping, 16 GB would be.. around $60) , anyways, go check out their website for more info…

john b

Uninstall the Intego anti-virus app by following the developer's instructions. Anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, and third party security software are not needed on a Mac. These types of apps usually cause more problems than they solve, plus they impact system performance.

macOS already has great built-in security especially when combined with the user practicing safe computing habits as outlined in this article written by a respected forum contributor:

Effective defenses against malware and other threats - Apple Community

The speed of the hard drive is good (70MB/s). If uninstalling Intego does not help, then check the health of the hard drive by running DriveDx and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. Generally any "Warning" or "Failing" notices in DriveDx indicates a worn out or failing drive respectively.

If it is a 21.5-inch iMac, the RAM slots are so inaccessible that some pros won't attempt to access them, so basically, no.

If a 27-inch, yes, the slots are users accessible

👉🏻 HOWEVER!...

Befoer you spend money uslessly, I doubt you have a RAM problem. Your report shows the Mac is very effectively using its RAM.

Please make sure you are not stressing over something that changed years ago. Starting with macOS 10.9 in Oct 2013, Apple re-engineered its software RAM allocation scheme based on the principle that “unused RAM is wasted RAM.” "Memory Used" may be good for Windows but is nearly useless for today's macOS. The current metrics for Mac RAM evaluation changed in 2013 to "Memory Pressure" and "Swap Used."

If Pressure is in the green and Swap Used is zero or nearly so, everything is working normally. Your chart says "not a RAM problem."

What is a known problem for iMacs made between 2012 and 2019, especially the 21.5-inch models, is the slow and under-spec mechanical hard drives Apple installed. The old drives are simple not up to the modern macOS versions.

ADDING RAM WILL NOT HELP THE HARD DRIVE ISSUE.

That is all based on history, not your symptoms. For us to recommend actions specific to your situation, we need to know about your current hardware configuration and your drive's performance. We need a system config profile.

Fortunately there is a safe, secure way to do that without playing a protracted game of "20 Questions" that could go on for days.

We can quickly and within the confines of these forums help you determine what issues are at play if you use EtreCheck Pro, available here:

https://etrecheck.com/index

The free version will do nicely for this purpose, although the app is worthy of our financial support.

We can see hard data about drive performance, software issues, and RAM usage. Etrecheck is the development of a long-serving and trusted contributor here expressly for displaying information in these forums to help us help you. It will not reveal any personal or secure information.

Run it, select “Report" from the left-hand pane (scroll down to the bottom of that pane to find):

When its report displays, click the "Share Report" icon from EtreCheck’s toolbar and then "Copy report” from the resulting dropdown.

⚠️ Please DO NOT highlight the text in the report before using Etrecheck’s “Copy report” command—that will garble the formatting and make the report slower and harder to evaluate.

NOTE: Changes in late 2018 to the forum software require you use the “Additional Text" icon (see example below) to embed the report into a post:

Paste the report into the resulting “Additional Text” window:

With the repot we can give you very targeted advice on how to proceed,

macOS now fills all the memory by default since unused memory is wasted memory/resources. Unless the "Memory Pressure" goes into the red (or stays high in the yellow), or if the "Swap Used" and "Compressed" become GBs in size, then adding more RAM won't help you.

Edit: Also, only the 27" Intel models of recent years allow for the user to access the physical memory. The 21.5" models don't have an access panel for the memory and requires the iMac to be completely taken apart to access the memory on the back of the Logic Board....definitely not something for the average user to do, although an AASP may perform the upgrade.

Given that the memory pressure is green and fairly low, adding more RAM is not really going to help there. The usage at 6GB is fairly standard. There's nothing wrong there.

I would look at the hard drive first. If it's 1 TB mechanical drive, those were notoriously slow in those models, and will only be slower with time and use.

If it's a 27" iMac, you can add more RAM easily through the panel on the back.

If it's a 21.5" iMac, then complete disassembly is required to get to the RAM.

The 27" iMac can be upgraded up to 32GB of RAM, while the 21.5 iMac can only be upgraded to 16GB.

To upgrade the hard drive to an SSD, complete disassembly is required as well, but if you already have to do this for the RAM, it may be a more worthwhile upgrade than the RAM.

The hard drive is showing as healthy, but attribute# 193 "Load Cycle Count" is getting near to end of life with the "Worst" value is 34 (counting down to 1). I know once this value reaches "1", that the hard drive can have odd intermittent issues including performance issues. I don't usually experience too many drives with the Load Cycle Count at 30% so I don't really know when these odd issues start to appear (theoretically it should be Ok until the value reaches 1 since the manufacturers thinks the drive should be Ok until this value reaches 1). The "Load Cycle Count" is the number of times the drive heads have been parked so the more times means the heads have been worn (in your case this has occurred 668,726 times as shown in the "RAW" value of this attribute).

Based on the number of hours on this drive you may have about another 10K runtime hours on this drive before the "Load Cycle Count" becomes an issue assuming the same rate of increase. The "Load Cycle Count" is just an "Old Age" attribute indicator. The drive may run fine for much longer after the value reaches 1 (or around 900,000 for the RAW value), but I would start preparing for that moment now so you are not caught off guard. Most of my experience is with laptops whose drives experience a lot more physical abuse than a drive within an iMac.